to your /etc/portage/package.keywords to unmask it.
If it works, please report that fact to bugs.gentoo.org. See if there is a bug already, if so, add to it. If not make a new one.
Report what you did to confirm it works.

Its a case of the devs gathering test evidence that it can be made stable.

Be aware that it may depend on other testing packages, in which case you need to add them to /etc/portage/package.keywords too._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

if your gentoo ppc is a 32bit version i strongly suggest to you to use IcedTea-1.9 OpenJDK Shark VM.
It's faster and lighter then Zero VM build (and totally better then any IBM binary release)._________________LinuxPPC user!
my blog: http://linuxpowerpc.blogspot.com/

AFAIK, it's currently not possible to bootstrap java on ppc without using additional overlays. Still, once the initial version of java is bootstrapped all overlays can be removed. I think it'd be possible to prepare ppc version of icedta-bin (similar to what is available on x86 and amd64) which would remove dependency on the overlays.

@blob999
Thanks for the suggestion. I rarely use java so speed is not important for me. I just wanted to see if it's possible to get rid of ibm-jdk which requires manual download each time it's upgraded.

I´m sorry, i´m very new, I try to install java, and i think i can use it, i put ACCEPT_LICENSE="IBM-J1.6"
and all was ok, but java-config --list-available-vms dont show me nothing and i can´t use java, anyone can tell me how to install java? or any place to get ppc help, i follow these steps but i can´t install nothing, no kde, no java, etc

What did you attempt to install to get Java? Even after changing the license, you need to actually emerge "ibm-jdk-bin". As for your other problems, please put them in a new topic and give us some details. Thanks!_________________Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

if your gentoo ppc is a 32bit version i strongly suggest to you to use IcedTea-1.9 OpenJDK Shark VM.
It's faster and lighter then Zero VM build (and totally better then any IBM binary release).

Is that true? Then I would definitely go for icedtea and drop IBM jdk, finally getting rid of the manual downloads for updates.
It has been said that icedtea is slower than SUN JRE on x86, but it is still faster than IBM?

This would be another reason to finally set icedtea to at least ~ppc._________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G | amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),i5-3470,VMware VM @ i7-2620M | amd64-prefix:OpenSuse | Lila-Theme

Is that true? Then I would definitely go for icedtea and drop IBM jdk, finally getting rid of the manual downloads for updates.
It has been said that icedtea is slower than SUN JRE on x86, but it is still faster than IBM?

Also, be aware that icedtea still has some problems with its browser plugin. Because of bug 588 I cannot use it for java-nsplugin. So I still need to have sun-jre-bin installed.

Because of bug 588 I cannot use it for java-nsplugin. So I still need to have sun-jre-bin installed.

And as for ppc this would be the ibm-jre alternative.
But nice, as I see you can have both installed while using icedtea as system-vm and setting nsplugin to the other.

Please keep this thread informed if there are any news in icedtea towards nsplugin.

What I don't understand in detail, what is the job of icedtea? It is not a JDK itself. While the JDK is OpenJDK, icedtea is a build harness for the OpenJDK(taken from icedtea FAQ). What does that mean?
Then I read it is not possible currently to get icedtea installed for the first time without using overlays. Afterwards the bootstrapping would work without the overlay, is that true? Which overlay is needed?

Then I read it is not possible currently to get icedtea installed for the first time without using overlays. Afterwards the bootstrapping would work without the overlay, is that true? Which overlay is needed?

At least on amd64, no overlay is needed. Bootstrapping with gcj-jdk-4.4.4 works fine here.

What I don't understand in detail, what is the job of icedtea? It is not a JDK itself. While the JDK is OpenJDK, icedtea is a build harness for the OpenJDK(taken from icedtea FAQ). What does that mean?

The sun jdk didin't become open overnight and there were a lot of missing bits and pieces. Icedtea was the project filling in those pieces (mostly gnu classpath) and providing a build system for it. The code on it's own is rather useless for end users.

Icedtea is a jdk based on openjdk one could say, trying to keep the differences low.

Quote:

Then I read it is not possible currently to get icedtea installed for the first time without using overlays. Afterwards the bootstrapping would work without the overlay, is that true? Which overlay is needed?

The development happens in the java-overlay. Not sure it's still needed to bootstrap icedtea so. Might depend on architecture. There you can also find icedtea7.

Reading ZeroSharkFaq...
Does that mean, there is a OpenJDK PPC port of IcedTea from Red Hat? And Zero was only to support other archs than x86, x86-64, SPARC and now PPC?
So while Zero is very slow, it is not required at least for PPC?

So now about Shark, this was written to build Zero by using LLVM and therefore JIT, just to improve the performance deficiency of Zero a bit?

Still the question, what is the best way to install IcedTea on PPC? USE="-zero"?_________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G | amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),i5-3470,VMware VM @ i7-2620M | amd64-prefix:OpenSuse | Lila-Theme

Reading ZeroSharkFaq...
Does that mean, there is a OpenJDK PPC port of IcedTea from Red Hat? And Zero was only to support other archs than x86, x86-64, SPARC and now PPC?
So while Zero is very slow, it is not required at least for PPC?

Sun released OpenJDK as an open source Java, but it required the use of some non-open source things to get it to run. IcedTea was essentially a RedHat project to complete the OpenJDK, sort of a "last mile" effort to provide a truly open Java. Read more on Wikipedia.

I can't say for sure that PPC requires Zero, but building IcedTea6 on my PowerBook results in a Zero build without selecting USE="zero":

So now about Shark, this was written to build Zero by using LLVM and therefore JIT, just to improve the performance deficiency of Zero a bit?

Pretty much, yeah. At least, that's what I get out of it. HotSpot uses static assembly optimizations, Zero is a port of HotSpot to remove the non-portable assembly, and Shark is a JIT-optimized Zero.

Massimo B. wrote:

Still the question, what is the best way to install IcedTea on PPC? USE="-zero"?

Looks like that USE flag doesn't do anything on PPC as Zero is automatically selected. Unless HotSpot really does support PPC (doesn't look like it), Zero is probably the most supported VM, while Jam claims to be faster. CACAO was an experimental (academic?) VM that compiled the Java classes into native machine code as they were loaded. The theoretical performance benefit of running native code seems to be mitigated by the long compile times and lack of robust optimizations. It would be interesting to compare the speed of Jam vs. CACAO vs. Zero, but Jam and CACAO appear to not provide an entirely complete VM (missing some debugging interfaces?). I haven't attempted to build anything beyond the default Zero VM yet.

What we really need is a "shark" USE flag...

sera wrote:

The development happens in the java-overlay. Not sure it's still needed to bootstrap icedtea so. Might depend on architecture. There you can also find icedtea7.

dev-java/icedtea no longer requires anything from overlays. It does require a gcj-jdk version matching your GCC (i.e. dev-java/gcj-jdk-4.4.5 for sys-devel/gcc-4.4.5), and GCC needs the gcj USE flag.

As far as I understand, PPC will always get a Zero build, even without the USE="zero".
Isn't there a Shark Zero built possible?
From the ZeroSharkFaq I understand there is a native IcedTea PPC-Port from RedHat which comes without the slow Zero?

Did anyone try the Cacao-VM or JamVM? There we have a USE-flag for and Cacao and JamVM also use a JIT compiler. Originally Cacao was planned to be a fast alternative for SUN JDK before they also switched to JIT. JamVM even had the G3 and G4 as main platform long time and claims to be highly optimized there._________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G | amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),i5-3470,VMware VM @ i7-2620M | amd64-prefix:OpenSuse | Lila-Theme

SciMark scores are... disappointing. They're so bad, in fact, they don't register on the visual comparison graph, and it's hard to accept them as valid. I ran SciMark on Shark, IBM's, and GCJ. I don't know what GCJ's score was because of major UI issues (possibly limited to gcj-jdk-4.4.5, newer versions might solve it), but it didn't show up on the visual graph either. Tests were run on my 1.67GHz PowerBook G4. For reference, my dual 2.6GHz Pentium 4 Xeon scores 567.4 running Sun's JRE. All tests were performed by running SciMark on the command line, not inside a browser. I'll test JamVM and CACAO if I can get them to build. I attempted to build JamVM once already, but it failed with a linking error. Oh, I need to test plain Zero as well.

Assuming we can trust these SciMarks, it's not entirely surprising IBM has the fastest VM. My CPU is an IBM processor; it's possible they know what they're doing. However, interacting with the SciMark UI does not show a noticeable difference in speed between IBM and the others, as the results would suggest. I feel that the Shark and GCJ scores are not reporting correctly. The SciMark UI has a couple minor issues with the result submission form, but they happened with all VMs, even Sun's JRE on my P4 Xeon.

For those wishing to try this themselves, I emerged icedtea-6.1.10.3 from a modified ebuild. In fact, I copied the whole /usr/portage/dev-java/icedtea directory to my local overlay and enabled the shark USE flag. It helped that most of it was already in the ebuild. :) Everyone else can just apply the shark patch from bug 257567.

If you have a local overlay set up, apply the patch like so (Don't copy and paste; adapt the commands to your situation):

When I initially tried to emerge icedtea with USE="shark", it couldn't link to LLVM. I don't know why ld couldn't find the .so file; it seems to be an issue with LLVM not inserting its paths into the library search variables. My quick fix was to toss a link to it into one of ld's known paths (as seen above). This is probably a bad idea, but I can't think of any immediate issues. This is for testing only, and should not be used "for real". It's probably better to place the path in /etc/ld.so.conf.d/, but I couldn't get that to work, even after running env-update and sourcing /etc/profile. My system may have linking issues...

Did you compare the Shark score with the score from IcedTea coming from the current dev-java/icedtea (obviously being a Zero built)?

By the way, while reading about these disappointing score, as mentioned here I already successfully use the dev-java/icedtea VM for some applications on my PB-G4 such as german Hibiscus (banking and finance) which fails on IBM-JDK and is only tested by the developer on SUN-JDK.
...and it is usable and not that slow (given that this is one of the only portable banking solutions on Linux-ppc beside gnucash, which I was not able to get connected to my account. Don't forget to replace the swt.jar with those coming from dev-java/swt)._________________ppc:PowerBook5,8 15"(1440)-G4/1.67,2G | amd64:Acer Z5610 (Core2QuadQ8200),i5-3470,VMware VM @ i7-2620M | amd64-prefix:OpenSuse | Lila-Theme

No, I have not yet benchmarked IcedTea's plain Zero build. It will be a few hours at the least before I can do that as I have to rebuild the icedtea package. And I don't want to do that until I remember how to save the current build as a tbz2 binary package.

SciMark only tests math computation speeds, not UI, memory allocation or other background stuff. Very few Java programs I am aware of crunch that many numbers. OpenJDK may show better results with different benchmarking software. SciMark is the only one I knew about (but I have a very limited knowledge there).

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